Like almost everyone who was alive to bear witness, Kate Mulgrew clearly recalls the moment 50 years ago — July 20, 1969 — that astronaut Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon.

She was 14 years old, at her family’s home in Dubuque, Iowa, and awestruck, says Mulgrew, who as an adult would guide her starship through the galaxies as Captain Kathryn Janeway on “Star Trek: Voyager.”

But at the time, it was small things she noticed. Like the family television was on for something other than a Notre Dame football game. And the room was quiet and full of emotion.

“It was a big, boisterous Irish Catholic family, and I remember clearly being stunned at the silence in that room,” Mulgrew says by phone from her home in New York City. “The silence that pervaded the TV room when we landed on the moon I will never forget as long as I live. The silence you could have cut with a knife.

“Obviously, much hinged on this,” she says. “And then final success of it was as if something glorious had happened to us in that room.”

Actress Kate Mulgrew narrates the new Audible Original audio book “The Space Race,” an apt choice for the job given that she played the role of Capt. Kathryn Janeway on “Star Trek: Voyager” for seven seasons. (Courtesy of Kate Mulgrew)

“The Space Race” is an Audible Original audiobook narrated by actress Kate Mulgrew. (Courtesy of Audible)

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Kate Mulgrew is the author of the recent memoir “How To Forget,” as well as the narrator of the Audible Original audiobook “The Space Race.” (Photo courtesy of the author/HarperCollins)

Kate Mulgrew’s new memoir “How To Forget” tells the stories of her her parents’ lives. (Courtesy of HarperCollins)

Kate Mulgrew, a cast member in the Netflix series “Orange is the New Black,” poses at An Evening with “Orange is the New Black,” at the Paley Center on Thursday, May 26, 2016, in Beverly Hills, Calif. (Photo by Chris Pizzello/Invision/AP)

Kate Mulgrew, fourth from left, cuts the cake as fellow cast members of ?Star Trek: Voyager? celebrate the filming of the Paramount Network Television series 100th episode on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles, Wednesday, August 12, 1998. From left are Tim Russ, Robert Picardo, Ethan Phillips, Mulgrew, Jeri Ryan, Robert Beltran, Roxann Dawson, Garrett Wang and Robert Duncan McNeill. ?Star Trek: Voyager? enters its fifth series this fall on UPN. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)

Her father T.J. Mulgrew, a stoic man and a member of the Greatest Generation, had a deep, resonant voice that hushed the children as the moment neared.

“And then when the words were spoken — ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ — I think I spied a tear in my father’s eye, which was to me very unsettling and also at the same time empowering,” Mulgrew says. “That tear told me that this was something huge. And it was.”

Mulgrew is the narrator for the new Audible Original “The Space Race,” which arrives on Saturday, July 20, the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, her long résumé as an actor and narrator, and her high-profile in the “Star Trek” universe, coming together neatly with the audiobook.

“it’s a natural fit,” Mulgrew allows. “I’m Captain Janeway, first female captain of a starship, associated with the ‘Star Trek’ franchise, so what could be more auspicious or correct than to get a captain’s voice behind this first movement into space?”

“The Space Race,” which in addition to Mulgrew’s narrations incorporates current and archival interviews and recreations in its production, opens with a chapter on where men and women might venture into space in years to come, and then drops back in time to the start of the space race in the years after World War II, letting the story unfold in chronological order thereafter.

Mulgrew, who said that in the years after the moon landing, as she moved from Iowa to New York City to pursue a career on stage and screen, she paid less attention to the space exploration efforts of the United States and other nations. Narrating “The Space Race” gave her fresh exposure to that history, she says.

“In broader terms of things that struck me, Russia’s vision, almost eclipsing our own,” Mulgrew mentions. “Of course, they are a visionary people, the Russian writers, the Russian thinkers have long been epic. So naturally when they set their sights for space they did it with an ambition, an intention, and a laser-like focus.

“And we were neck and neck for a very long time,” she says. “They may have even been ahead. It was only at the very end that we caught up.”

The interviews with astronauts that the book includes also struck her as “very moving and often disconcerting,” Mulgrew says. “The astronauts, who appear to be placid people, are in fact just the opposite. It is that placid demeanor that belies the passion beneath.

“They are wildly passionate about space. They are prepared to put their life on the line every time they go up there.”

When she embarked on her seven seasons on “Star Trek: Voyager,” Mulgrew says she dove deeply back into the history and science of space, studying not only “the Okuda bible” — franchise guide to all rules and terminology of the Star Trek universe — but also the work of such theoretical physicists as Richard Feynman and Brian Greene.

“Everything had to have real significance and intention,” she says. “Because the Star Trek audience is inordinately smart. We understand it’s fanciful but the real question is, ‘Is it?’ To them, not only is not particularly fanciful but I think they have no doubt that it will and can be realized.”

While she only narrates “The Space Race” — it lists nine co-authors — Mulgrew in May saw HarperCollins publish “How To Forget,” her second memoir, this one using the end of her parents’ lives as a jumping off point to explore who they were and how they became so.

“I don’t think this is the book I intended to write,” she says of what became a follow-up to the 2015 memoir “Born With Teeth.” “I went over to Ireland, I was lent a house by a friend in a beautiful part of Connemara. I intended, I think, to write something else altogether but every time I would sit down at the computer to flesh it out I would come around to my parents.

“It was a haunting kind of subconscious ice pick that just kept tap-tap-tapping away,” Mulgrew says. “So one day I said, ‘All right, I’m going to pay attention to this.’”

She started to think about the night she arrived home from to learn her father had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and how they stayed up late by the fire drinking most of a bottle of vodka and talking.

“I thought, ‘This could be the center of the story of what matters in terms of who they were, how they shaped me, but most importantly how they were shaped by one another, and by loss, by grief,” she says.

She believes “How To Forget” is a better book than her first because instead of the more traditional, linear structure of a memoir she used in “Born With Teeth,” here she wanted to see if she could really write on a higher level.

“And the only way to figure that out was to walk the plank of honesty, because writers are not good if they’re disingenuous,” Mulgrew says. “And the sure way to get there would be through the two people who I loved most in the world. I was not about to screw around with.

“So risks are taken. If you don’t want to take risks or you’re not prepared, don’t write then. Continue acting, that’s perfectly nice, but don’t write.

“Because you owe it to yourself to not only be frank but lyrical,” she says, and laughs. “That’s kind of a strange combo, you know?”

Mulgrew says she feels “How To Forget,” which has earned much acclaim so far, proved she can be the writer she wants to be. She’s still acting. Her run as the Russian chef Red on “Orange Is The New Block” is ending with the series, but she recently played a “dark and delicious” psychopath in the third season of the Stephen King adaptation “Mr. Mercedes.”

But a new book — her first novel — already is percolating.

“It was wonderfully gratifying to have written it,” she says of “How To Forget.” “I remember crying, tears streaming down my cheeks when I wrote ‘The End’ in Ireland.

Peter Larsen has been the Pop Culture Reporter for the Orange County Register since 2004, finally achieving the neat trick of getting paid to report and write about the stuff he's obsessed about pretty much all his life. He regularly covers the Oscars and the Emmys, goes to Comic-Con and Coachella, reviews pop music, and conducts interviews with authors and actors, musicians and directors, a little of this and a whole lot of that. He grew up, in order, in California, Arkansas, Kentucky and Oregon. Graduated from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Ore. with degrees in English and Communications. Earned a master's degree at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Earned his first newspaper paycheck at the Belleville (Ill.) News-Democrat, fled the Midwest for Los Angeles Daily News and finally ended up at the Orange County Register. He's taught one or two classes a semester in the journalism and mass communications department at Cal State Long Beach since 2006. Somehow managed to get a lovely lady to marry him, and with her have two daughters. And a dog named Buddy. Never forget the dog.

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